If there weren't loads of witnesses who could verify the story, the church would have fizzled out, surely. There must have been an effort made to verify it, as there was with the Hillsborough disaster. The Jews seemed so intent on eradicating Christianity that it was 300 ad before it was formally accepted as the truth.

There are at best four witnesses who left us their stories. And that's ignoring the fact that those appear to be largely rewritten from the same sources, not contemporary with the events, and of dubious authorship.

Look at Mormonism. It started less than two hundred years ago on the word of a single person. Surely, it must have fizzled out by now?

There was no effort to verify it like Hillsborough, the early Christians were only interested in their beliefs. The council of Nicaea formalised things, but it wasn't a reliable case of verification and many of the early Christians who disagreed with the outcome would say so themselves if they could. And, 300 years or so after 300AD, a new Abrahamic religion formed and despite the apparent confirmed truth there was no mention of the resurrection.

Pagan faiths are still existent despite persecution by Christians. I guess that means my gods are real. Also historically Christianity spread by sword with convert or die mentality. Not to mention all the power grabs it could try for. Witnesses? Keep telling yourself that if it helps you sleep. Realistically it was persecution and turn or die that kept it going for so long

By that logic, EVERY religion is true. And there weren't "loads of witnesses". There was one guy who claimed decades later that there were loads of witnesses. None of whom ever told anyone else their stories, oddly enough. Given this single account of said witnesses, how wildly contradictory the writers of the books of the NT's versions of the story are, and given that all these incredible supernatural events (like the town full of zombies) are curiously recorded by NO ONE ELSE in the area around that time, their claims are less than worthless.

No. The world is literally littered with stupid beliefs, most have been around longer than your stupid childish nonsensical belief.

That people believe it and have believed it for a long time is a cultural continuance like a hundred other stupid beliefs.

Oh, those Biblical witnesses you're constantly claiming? The 5000 plus that 'Personally' witnessed the events? You can't claim a story written by one person and repeated by a few others as the personal witness of 5000.